So you've been hacked... now what?

It's not just annoying and inconvenient to your digital life, it can also cause genuine problems in the real world - being hacked doesn't just happen in the movies and not all .

Whether it's an email service, a bank account or even a social media login, the chances of disruption to your daily life increase as we become more and more connected across multiple platforms.

One of the most common attacks is to hack into email accounts, particularly web based services. Once an email account is compromised, hackers will often send out spam messages to everyone in your contact list in an effort to infect more computers. Sometimes they ask for help or money, or ask you to click a link.

In this sense, scammers are relying more on social engineering than computer trickery - they realise that a message from an email address that someone trusts is more likely to be clicked on than that of an anonymous sender. In a lot of cases the original owner isn't aware they've been hacked until their contacts alert them to the suspicious correspondence.

So what should you do if you've been attacked? The first thing you should do is change your password on the site affected, as well as on any other sites that may have the same or similar passwords.

You should also check that any login information for other sites isn't stored in your email account. While you're looking at your account, make sure that there haven't been any redirects set up on your address - this means that your mail isn't being sent somewhere else.

Once you've changed your login information, you should send an email to your contact list warning them of the security breach and to not open any links from you; it's bad enough you've been impacted, you don't want to share the experience with your friends and family.

While your security senses are heightened, it's probably a good idea to run a scan on your machine for malware. While there's no direct correlation between having an external account hacked and an infected machine, now is the time to be vigilant!

There's no silver bullet to internet security, but being careful with your habits, changing your passwords regularly to something that isn't simply a word and always checking the URL's of suspicious links before clicking them will help you stay sane in the surf.